the First Beauty

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Knowledge comes about insofar as the object known is within the knower.

—St. Thomas Aquinas

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This is the Great Truth of “adaequatio” (adequateness), which defines knowledge as adequatio et rei et intellectus—the understanding of the knower must be adequate to the thing to be known.

[] “As above, so below’ the ancients used to say: to the world outside us there corresponds, in some fashion, a world inside us.


—E.F. Schumacher
A Guide for the Perplexed

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Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object.

Never did the eye see the sun unless it has first become sunlike, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.


—Plotinus

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drama of the visible and the invisible

Tree of Knowledge, 1913

Hilma af Klint, Swedish 

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There slumbers in every human being faculties by means of which he can acquire for himself a knowledge of higher worlds. Mystics, Gnostics, Theosophists — all speak of a world of soul and spirit which for them is just as real as the world we see with our physical eyes and touch with our physical hands.

[...] Just as in the body, eye and ear develop as organs of perception, as senses for bodily processes, so does a man develop in himself soul and spiritual organs of perception through which the soul and spiritual worlds are opened to him.

For those who do not have such higher senses, these worlds are dark and silent, just as the bodily world is dark and silent for a being without eyes and ears.


―Rudolf Steiner

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It is clear that 'higher' always means and implies 'more inner,' 'more interior', 'deeper', 'more intimate'; while 'lower' implies 'more outer', 'more external', 'shallower', 'less intimate' ... the more interior a thing is, the less visible it is likely to be. 

The progression from visibility to invisibility is just another facet of the great hierarchy of Levels of Being. We do not understand that life, before all other definitions of it, is a drama of the visible and the invisible.

Our ordinary mind always tried to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but this is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees.


―E.F. Schumacher
A Guide for the Perplexed, excerpts

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allchannels

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